RESOURCES FILM REVIEW ESSAY Dead Souls Produced and Directed by Wang Bing Grasshopper Film and Icarus Films, 2018 DVD, 3 discs, 8 hours, 15 minutes, Color Mandarin / English subtitles

Reviewed by Glenn D. Tiffert

iabiangou lies on the edge of the Gobi Desert near the city of Jiu- quan, in the northwest pocket of China’s Gansu Province. Today, Zhou Xiaoli in a scene from Wang Bing’s Dead Souls. Source: Screen capture from a Dead Souls trailer on the region is home to China’s premier satellite launch center, but YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/y4ceuzkj. © Grasshopper Film and Icarus Films. Jfrom 1957 to 1961, it was the nucleus of a labor camp complex in which more than 80 percent of the prisoners died, mostly of starvation. One anyone at the time with a high school education or higher, and consequent- of countless sites of mass death during the Mao period (1949–1976), ly, they tended to work as midlevel cadres or in learned professions such as many of which far exceed it in scale, ’s history might never journalism or teaching. But the comparatively privileged backgrounds and have reached us but for a dedicated group of Chinese memoirists, nov- ties to the old regime that had facilitated their educations left many of them elists, and filmmakers who are daring their contemporaries not only acutely vulnerable as the revolution worked its way through an expanding to learn about the inhumanities that transpired there, but also to reck- list of class enemies. In the charged atmosphere of the Anti-Rightist Cam- on with the system that produced them and its legacies in the present. paign, when the body politic was required to search out and purify itself of Dead Souls (2018) is the fourth and most ambitious film about Jiabian- hidden foes, their indiscretions or mild criticisms were construed as con- gou by the acclaimed director Wang Bing.1 Between 2005 and 2017, Wang clusive proof of hostility to the CCP. conducted 120 interviews with The survivors appearing in the camp survivors, nearly twenty of Wang Bing’s latest is a monumental work film generally hew to their own sto- whom, mostly men, speak at length ries, but after an almost-desensitiz- in the film. He punctuates their tes- of testimony, largely comprised of ing procession of similar narratives, timonies with tearful scenes from their atomistic voices coalesce into a survivor’s burial (0:42), the rec- interviews with survivors of the Jiabian- a chorus of horrifying truths about ollections of a former guard (7:20), gou and Mingshui re-education camps of revolutionary China. Many people and several visits to the desolate site were labeled as rightists not because of the former camp, now strewn in the late 1950s, which were set up in the of any particular animus against the places with fragments of clothing CCP but to satisfy arbitrary quotas, and bleached human bones. The Gobi Desert to imprison alleged or as a result of minor transgres- structure, stylings, and pacing of sions or petty workplace grudges the eight-hour documentary suggest reactionaries and anti-Communists a and jealousies, which were wea- Claude Lanzmann’s epic film about decade after China’s revolution in 1949. ponized by a system that wielded the Holocaust, Shoah. However, its power despotically and that period- title cleverly evokes Gogol’s classic Source: The Dead Souls page for the film’s premiere at the Lincoln Center, New York City, ically renewed itself through ritual satire about moral and spiritual de- New York, at https://www.filmlinc.org/films/dead-souls/. human sacrifice. Once singled out, cay in nineteenth-century Russia. they endured frenzied denuncia- Jiabiangou opened in 1954 as a reform through labor () camp for tions in public “struggle” meetings that could last for days, at which asso- convicted criminals serving fixed-term sentences. However, in 1957, this ciates had no choice but to participate energetically lest they themselves population was moved and the facility was restyled a reeducation through arouse suspicions of sympathy for the accused and guilt by association. Al- labor (laojiao) camp in time to receive a surge of prisoners condemned together, around 190,000 people across Gansu Province were attacked and during an intense phase of political persecution known as the Anti-Right- humiliated in this way, and the figures were still higher in other provinces. ist Campaign (1957–1958). In theory, reeducation through labor was a A wave of psychological collapses, divorces, and suicides ensued. lighter, extrajudicial sanction that many workplaces or local committees Only a small fraction of those labeled as rightists were sent to the of the (CCP) could impose on people admin- camps, but Dead Souls establishes that not a few of them arrived at Jiabian- istratively. But in reality the severity of its regime was often comparable gou convinced of their loyalty to the party. They naively hoped that higher to reform through labor, and, even worse, its duration was indeterminate, authorities would discover and reverse the miscarriages of justice that led which meant that it could extend as long as authorities saw fit. to their internments, or at least reward their devotion to self-improvement The survivors who appear in Dead Souls were in their twenties and and hard labor, and soon judge them worthy to return to their former lives. thirties when the Anti-Rightist Campaign upended their lives. They were Most could not fathom the scale of the mendacity around them or that the the first generation to come of age in the People’s Republic and, for a time, revolution they had served could wantonly turn against them. Promised a enjoyed the opportunities for advancement that the revolution had opened heroic opportunity to turn the desert green, they were instead condemned up. Most were “intellectuals,” a broad term that could encompass nearly to a forgotten wasteland. Worse, their survival cruelly preserved them as

70 Education About ASIA Volume 24, Number 3 Winter 2019 RESOURCES FILM REVIEW ESSAY targets for later campaigns and burdened their families with protracted discrimination and ostracism. They would struggle to make sense of these betrayals for the remainders of their lives. Dead Souls describes these events unsparingly, including the insults starvation inflicts on the human body and on conventional morality. At first, the rations allocated to prisoners amounted to just under a kilo of grain per day, on which they could survive, especially when supplemented by food sent by their families. But by October 1959, the rations had shrunk to around 250 grams per day. Discipline in the camps collapsed as prison- ers grew too weak to work, and then bloated horribly and died. Survivors remember seeing the works of , Karl Marx, and Vladimir Le- nin laying in latrines or burned as fuel, a damning inversion of the ideolog- ical reeducation they were meant to receive. But of course, not all suffered or died equally. Kitchen staff devised ingenious strategies for stealing food Gao Guifang in a scene from Wang Bing’s Dead Souls. Source: Grasshopper Film at https://tinyurl.com/ under the eyes of their watchers and quietly doled out choice morsels to y4nyrr8r. © Grasshopper Film and Icarus Films. favored comrades. One survivor boasts in the film that fellow prisoners nicknamed him khryushka (“pig” in Russian) since he routinely ate his fill and even grew fat, in part because he worked in the cadres’ kitchen. At the height of the famine, camp cadres enjoyed nearly double the rations of their charges, which left them hungry but alive. Dead Souls does not lend itself to truncated excerpts or sound bites. For teaching purposes, three of its contributors stand out: Zhao Tiemin (4:39), because of the broadly representative and dramatic flavor of his testimony; Li Jinghang (5:46), whose eschatological Christian worldview both stigma- tized and sustained him; and Zhu Zhaonan (7:20), a former camp cadre. Since the film assumes familiarity with the broader historical context of the period, it is best paired in the classroom with background material on the 1949 revolution, and more specifically on the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the , and its associated famine. This framing will equip Survivors Chen Zonghai and Xi Xiashan burn joss paper offerings to honor those who died at the camp. Source: Screen capture from Dead Souls trailer on YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/yyowljqq. students to appreciate how a sequence of calamitous policies transformed © Grasshopper Film and Icarus Films. Jiabiangou from a harsh labor colony into a death camp. Briefly, the CCP first launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which purged or cowed its crit- releasing prisoners back to their work units to save the few who remained, ics, especially by assailing the customary social prestige, moral autonomy, and over the course of 1961, the camp wound down and closed. The toll was and self-regard of the country’s intellectuals as rightful stewards of the na- catastrophic; out of a total camp population of around 3,200, approximately tion. Then, it launched the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous program of 2,700 died. From the city of Tianshui, roughly 300 people went to Jiabian- crash industrialization and collectivization that precipitated an agricultur- gou, but only about twenty came out, and some work units and districts al collapse, which killed more than thirty million. Gansu was among the received no survivors at all. A portion of the city’s educated population provinces hardest hit by this famine, owing to the ideological radicalism of had effectively been liquidated. Moreover, those who returned faced the its leadership. Once starvation stalked the population outside of the camps, indignity of reintegrating with the workplaces and colleagues that had dis- the fate of those inside was sealed. patched them to the camps in the first place. Finally, in 1978, two years after Galvanized by the Great Leap Forward, Gansu’s Party leadership not Mao died, the party authorized work units nationwide to lift the “rightist only cut off Jiabiangou’s grain supply and fancifully declared it self-suffi- hats” of the accused. According to official figures, more than 99 percent of cient, but also murderously required it to forfeit a quota of its own produc- the 550,000 people so encumbered were ultimately cleared in a fig leaf com- tion to the state at the expense of its inhabitants. Foreseeably, the camp’s promise that upheld the overall legitimacy of the Anti-Rightist Campaign crop failed because the climate was arid, the soil was highly alkaline, and while acknowledging errors in implementation. Then, the CCP closed the the prisoners grew so hungry that they ate their own seed grain. Since mail book on the Anti-Rightist Campaign and never publicly looked back. was monitored, they did not dare tell their families how dire circumstanc- In important ways, Jiabiangou was a microcosm of the nation. Across es had become. In any case, families outside were also going hungry, and the early PRC, the party crushed real and imagined enemies while it blind- the food parcels they sent were often opened and plundered in transit. By ly pursued quixotic fantasies that hastened the deaths of tens of millions. the time the CCP began to confront the scale of the disaster sweeping the Whether they were trapped in labor camps, towns, or rural people’s com- province (and indeed the country) in late 1960, most of the prisoners at the munes, the victims of this era were all prisoners. By rescuing their memory main Jiabiangou camp had died. The ragged survivors were hastily moved from obscurity, artists and activists like Wang Bing are honoring those who to a satellite camp (Mingshui), where conditions were worse. When they suffered injustice and challenging the license of the PRC state to various- arrived, it was already too late in the season for planting, and, because there ly erase, sanitize, and repackage their traumas into sources of continuing was no infrastructure in place to receive them, they spent the harsh winter legitimacy. Hence, Dead Souls is not just a deeply political interrogation living in crude, communal pits dug into the earth. of the systems of power and morality that made Jiabiangou and similar The dying therefore accelerated, and some of the desperate even turned barbarities possible, but also a prompt to reflect on their uncomfortable to cannibalism. Within months, new provincial leaders decided to begin echoes in the present.

71 RESOURCES FILM REVIEW ESSAY

There are moments in Dead Souls when the suppressed tension be- compromise its participants by compelling such complicity, eventually en- tween past and present erupts. Many graves at Jiabiangou were marked tangling nearly everyone in the dual roles of perpetrator and victim—a with small stones bearing the names of the occupants. With the passage strategy that cleverly blurred the distinctions between individual and sys- of time, the ink on these stones is fading, effectively anonymizing the as- temic culpability, and claimed the souls of all. A Chinese audience would sociated remains, some of which have surfaced from their shallow graves likely grasp this subtext, but a foreign one might need clarification. and are now exposed to the elements. One survivor, Cao Zonghua (1:02), Because of their unvarnished explorations of sensitive subjects, Wang describes a recent attempt by former rightists to gather such remains into Bing’s films are not typically screened in the PRC, and Dead Souls is no a freshly dug resting place marked with a memorial stele on which they exception. While no documentary can hope to fully capture the monstrous had engraved the names of the corresponding dead. After first acceding history of Jiabiangou, the fragments Wang has preserved shock the con- to the project, local officials withdrew approval, bulldozed the site as an science. Aware of the party’s distaste for “historical nihilism” (CCP short- illegal construction, and then blocked future access by building a wall hand for an honest accounting of dark chapters from its past), Wang in- around it. Moreover, Cao avers that he is under surveillance for his ac- tentionally made Dead Souls with posterity in mind. Several of those who tivism, a plausible claim, given that the Chinese state rigorously polices appear in the film passed away before its release, and others will not be historical memory and frequently suppresses even small, independent with us for much longer. Wang gives their souls new life by helping them acts of remembrance as threats to social stability. Undeterred, Dead Souls speak while they still could, recording what they knew before it was lost shows human bones (including skulls) scattered elsewhere in the area as so that others can learn from it in time. Considering that the PRC is to- if to declare that the story of what transpired at Jiabiangou will not remain day silencing internal critics, scrubbing its history with renewed intensity, buried forever. building vast internment camps in the desert, announcing transformative As oral history, Dead Souls provides ample opportunity for viewers to new leaps into the future, and finding inspiration in the Maoist past, his wrestle with the problems of self-representation and positionality, and to timing was impeccable. n explore how the survivors navigate between the rhetorics of agency and victimhood in their testimonies. But by granting survivors a welcome plat- NOTES form from which to speak, the film also leaves much unsaid. For instance, 1. The earlier films are Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007), (2010), and we know that memories are unstable, dialogic constructs. How the sur- Traces (2014). An informative press kit for Dead Souls can be found at https://tinyurl. vivors talk about and make sense of their experiences in the camps may com/y2h4nht9. therefore be different today than it would have been a generation or two ago because their circumstances and the master narratives circulating around them have changed. At the very least, it is evident in the film that the material conditions of their lives have diverged widely, a reflection of GLENN D. TIFFERT is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, how the revolutionary project to which they sacrificed their youths has and a Historian of Modern China. His research has centered on Chinese legal history, veered in a very different direction and left many (but not all) behind. including publications on constitutionalism, the construction of a modern judiciary, and the genealogy of the rule of law in the PRC. His current book manuscript, provisionally ti- More complicated still, one could reasonably expect that many of those tled Judging Revolution, radically reinterprets the Mao Era and the 1949 revolution by way sent to Jiabiangou actively engaged in and profited from the serial polit- of a deep archival dive into the origins of the PRC judicial system. His current research ical campaigns that tormented the early PRC before they themselves fell probes the intersections between information technology and authoritarianism, and the from grace. After all, it was in the nature of Maoist politics to morally ramifications of China’s rise for American interests.

72 Education About ASIA Volume 24, Number 3 Winter 2019